Contentious performances: The case of street demonstrations

152 words) Street demonstrations are among the most frequently performed forms of collective action. Tilly has argued that such contentious performances obey the rules of strong repertoires. Participants in contentious performances are enacting available scripts within which they innovate, but mostly in small ways. As a consequence, street demonstrations are the same and different every time they occur. We present findings from a comparative study of the demonstrations at the 15 of February 2003 against the war in Iraq in eight different countries. We furthermore present a theoretical model to account for the similarities, variations and changes. Contextual variation is conceptualized in terms of the demand and supply-side of protest and mobilization as the dynamic that brings demand and supply together. Instrumental, identity, and ideological motivation and emotions are proposed as the dynamics of participation. To be tested, such a theory requires comparative research; therefore we wholeheartedly second Tilly’s call for more comparative research. On the 6th of June 2006 hundreds of thousands of people took it to the streets of Madrid to demonstrate against the Spanish government’s plans to negotiate with ETA. In an attempt to understand why people were taking part in the demonstration colleagues of us from the University of Santiago de Compostela interviewed over 400 participants in the demonstration. Our colleagues soon figured that the reasons why people took part were more complicated than one would be inclined to believe on the basis of the issue of the demonstration. This became clear when it was taken into account with which political party participants identified—the Partido Popular (PP) or the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol (PSOE)—and to what extent they identified with the AVT (Asociacion de Victimas del Terrorismo/Terrorist Victims Association) that was organizing the demonstration. To be sure, many demonstrators identified strongly with the AVT and this explained why they were taking part in the demonstration even if they were supporters of the PSOE (the party that was in government). However, quite some demonstrators did not so much identify with AVT but identified strongly with the PP (the party that not long before unexpectedly lost the elections in the wake of the bomb-attacks on the trains in Madrid). In fact, these people were not so much demonstrating against the negotiations as such, but rather more generally against the PSOE government which they accused of having ‘stolen’ their elections. Their answers to other parts of the interview confirmed this assumption. Indeed, one could argue, that when a demonstration grows that big, it concerns more than the focal issue and addresses also more general dissatisfaction with the government in office. For this assumption to be tested one should compare demonstrations over issues, time and place; research that hardly exists. In this chapter we will unfold a theoretical model that we developed for such research to be undertaken. We developed the model in the context of a large scale comparative study among participants in demonstrations in seven—possibly more—countries in the three years to come. We will illustrate our expose with results from research on demonstrations we have conducted over the past years. This chapter, its subject, and its title are a tribute to Charles Tilly. ‘Contentious Performances’ is the title of Tilly’s last book, which appeared in 2008 after he died. Contentious performances are contentious because they concern claims that bore on someone else’s interests and or values—often governments; they are performances because they follow some learned and historically grounded scripts, but like any performance there is room for innovation, mostly in small ways. Such performances, Tilly argues, clump into repertoires of claim-making routines that apply to the same claimant-object pairs: workers tend to strike against their bosses, citizens tend to march against their governments, and anti-globalists tend protest against meetings of transnational organizations. Repertoires vary from place to place, time to time, and pair to pair. Moreover, when people make claims they innovate within limits set by the repertoire already established for its specific place, time, and pair. Repertoires vary in terms of their rigidity from absence of any repertoire to rigid repertoires that repeat the same routines over and over as exactly as they can. Tilly holds that overwhelmingly public collective contention involves strong repertoires: “participants in contention are enacting available scripts within which they innovate, mostly in small ways” (p. 15). He urges us to construct catalogues of performances and their characteristics and to engage in comparative studies in order to understand variation and change in performances. Contentious Performances is Tilly’s attempt to document what he and others have found in terms of variation from setting to setting, from issue to issue, from time to time, and in terms of the factors that control such variations and changes. The political context is one of those settings. The book sketches contextual variation in three main ways: between regimes; within regimes, between political opportunity structures; and within political opportunity structures, between the strategic situations faced by different claim-making actors. Street demonstrations are examples of contentious performances. Tilly positions the origin of the street demonstration in Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. It became the performance staged by social movements; it soon became a multi-purpose tool rather than an instrument oriented to some single goal or political inclination. By the 1830s British activists had learned to mount all three variants of the street demonstration that are still familiar today: the march through public streets, the occupation of a public space for a gathering, and the combination of the two in a march to or from the meeting space. Roughly hundred year later street demonstrations made it to France to become the major means of advertising political identities and programs in France after World War I. In the last two decades of the 20 century the number of demonstrations in Paris alone increased from 200-400 per annum to 1.000-1.500 per annum. The question we personally have been working on all along is why individuals end up participating in collective action; a question Tilly never bothered to answer. He was much more interested in big structures and grand processes. Yet, there would be no contentious performances altogether if no individual citizen would decide to take part in it. With an international team of sociologists, political scientists, and social psychologists we designed a study that Tilly nonetheless would have appreciated. In the U.S. and in six European countries cf. the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and the U.K. we will go out to interview people in the act of demonstrating. We will try to understand how characteristics of nations, mobilizing contexts, and demonstrations influence who participates, why people participate, and how participants were mobilized. Against the war in Iraq But before we embark on this endeavor, we take you seven years back. Saturday 15 February 2003, over 20 million people in more than 600 cities spread over more than 60 countries, and over all continents demonstrated against the imminent war in Iraq. Social scientists in eight Western countries coordinated by Stefaan Walgrave seized the opportunity to design and conduct the first comparative study of street demonstrations ever (see Walgrave & Rucht, 2010). In Madrid, Rome, London, Glasgow, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle interviewers went to the demonstrations, interviewed participants, and distributed survey questionnaires to be filled in and returned to the university. Close 1 ‘Caught in the act of protest: Contextualizing Contestation’, www.protestsurvey.eu to 6.000 people took part in our study, making for the largest study of street demonstrations in history. A demonstration against the same war, at the same day, meant a unique opportunity to compare. As the performances were the same, but the context varied, we could assess the impact of such variation. Were the participants in the eight countries different, and if so were these differences attributable to national differences or different mobilizing contexts? Let’s have a look at some of the results. Not so surprising, the participants in the eight demonstrations were very similar as far as their opposition to the war was concerned (Table 1). After all, they were all demonstrating against the same imminent war in Iraq. But, note the huge differences in dissatisfaction with their government’s efforts to prevent the war between the first five countries in the table and the last three: very high levels of dissatisfaction for the former and high levels of satisfaction for the latter. This again is understandable as the U.S. and the U.K. were about to go at war with the support of Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, while the governments of Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany had declared to be opposed to the war.